Voting Machine Error Rates 40,000% Higher Than Allowed By Law!

Voter's Unite's Ellen Theisen Asks, "Does Anybody Care? Will the EAC or DoJ - or Even State Officials - Take Action Before the November General Election?"

HAVA Provisions Violated by Failed Voting Machines in New Jersey and Ohio

After New Jersey's February presidential primary election, 60 Sequoia Advantage DRE (also called touch-screen) voting machines were found to have voter turnout totals that did not match the totals on the machines' memory tapes. And in Ohio's March presidential primary, the Diebold (AKA Premier) GEMS central tabulator in Butler County failed to record the votes from one of the memory cards fed into it, despite reporting that data from all memory cards had been successfully uploaded. This Ohio discrepancy has only recently come to light as Butler County elections chose to disclose the problem.

As Ellen Theisen writes in a special dispatch to The BRAD BLOG,

The “maximum acceptable error rate” of one in 500,000 ballot positions (choices on a ballot) is an error rate of 0.0002%. But the error rate for the Advantage machine [in New Jersey] was 0.12%....

That error rate is more than 600 times as high (or 60,000%) as the maximum error rate allowable under by federal law.

Theisen continues,

...[T]he error rate on the Butler County GEMS server was between 400 and 900 times as high (40,000% to 90,000%) as the rate allowed by federal law.

Now that these facts are known, using New Jersey’s version of the Sequoia Advantage e-voting machines or Butler County’s version of the Diebold AccuVote/GEMS system (v.1-18-24.0) in the November 2008 election would be a violation of federal law. [emphasis in original]

Note: Both the Sequoia and the Diebold machines highlighted in this story are slated for use in next Tuesday's very important Pennsylvania primary election, which will be in violation of Federal law.